Every business owner or sales manager like you is constantly looking to increase the productivity of their sales team. Time and efficiency are the two critical things in the sales environment. Salespeople usually have so many tasks that they run out of time. So, they must do their tasks efficiently and productively.
When you have a productive sales team, you can run your business more effectively. You can close more deals because you have generated proper leads, have made more cold calls, etc. As a result, you have a higher conversion rate because converting your prospects is your expertise.
Here we will discuss some of the common sales productivity issues and recommend several solutions that can lead to higher sales productivity.
What Are the Common Sales Productivity Issues?
Sales productivity gets relatively inefficient whenever challenging issues occur. As a salesperson, you can improve workplace efficiency and coordinate your sales team to achieve high sales productivity.
To do so, you must first understand the obstacles that stand in the way of your sales productivity. We’ll go through some of the most common problems that most companies and brands are dealing with here:
- The lack of a consistent picture of priorities and objectives
- Having ambitions that are too lofty or insignificant
- There are no plans focused on the realities of the market, and there is no coordination from top to bottom.
- Inefficient technologies and resources that add to the workload rather than minimizing it
- The number of turnovers has changed.
- In-house coordination between various parts is non-existent.
Such issues can entail more than what has been discussed thus far. Educating the sales team and learning the solutions will assist you in overcoming these obstacles.
How to Increase Sales Productivity?
Once you’ve recognized the various problems that can wreak havoc on your sales team’s operations, you can take steps to address them to boost productivity. As a consequence, you’ll need some advice to help you deal with the problems.
Here you can find time-saving instructions and tips to help you boost your sales efficiency in a short amount of time.
Make Sure Your Customer Journey Is Smooth
One of the best ways to increase sales productivity is to make sure your customers have a smooth journey through your eCommerce website. Make sure that your visitors find it easy to navigate and place the most vital CTAs in the most engaging part of your website. How? Well, you can use tools such as Watch Them Live to generate click heatmaps on your website.
This feature allows you to see what parts of your landing pages or any other pages are more interactive.
Another great way to boost your sales in watching the session recordings of your visitors on your web. This way, you can see what your customers do on your website and find out any obstacles and pain points that they are facing that prevent them from getting to the final step of purchasing your products or services.
1. Make Clear and Realistic Goals
It’s difficult for a sales team to know where they’re going without a strategy. When you don’t have a strategy, your sales output will suffer, and you won’t get the most out of your activities.
If you want to boost your sales efficiency, you’ll need to set realistic and well-defined objectives and create a workable plan based on facts and realities.
You can make a regular, weekly, monthly, and annual schedule and strive to meet your targets daily, weekly, monthly, and annually. It makes no difference how long the strategy lasts. What counts is that you stick to the plan and give it your all to achieve your objectives.
2. Use Time/Task Managers
It’s essential to manage your sales team’s time and the activities they prioritize to increase sales efficiency. Controlling this necessitates automating time and task management.
Your team will function more effectively in terms of time management, thanks to automation. Therefore, the team will accomplish its objectives in a more cohesive manner and without the stress of meeting deadlines.
3. Create Your Customer Persona
A consumer persona, also known as a buyer persona, is a fictional character that reflects the attributes of a broad group of people. Use deep web analytics to gather attributes and data about a consumer persona.
Through a customer profile, you will gain insight into your prospects’ thoughts, tastes, and desires, among other things.
Define your ideal clients. Look for the factors that have contributed to your company’s sales. These variables are concealed in the tastes of your best customers.
You will improve your sales efficiency by focusing on them while preparing your sales strategy. Focusing on your best customers will also help you be more efficient with your time because you’ll know where to spend it.
A consumer persona is crucial for several reasons. Customer personas can add a lot of value and perspective to your business:
- It helps your sales team get a deeper understanding of consumer needs .
- Your sales staff can contribute to the product roadmap tool with features that can assist them in deal closures.
- You can prioritize sales efforts to focus your time and money.
As a result, building a customer identity not only helps you visualize your potential customers in the future but also helps you coordinate your sales activities. These two customer persona results lead to the achievement of objectives.
4. Start Sales Prospecting
Prospecting for sales is the first step in the process of selling goods and services. The significant revenue losses are unsurprising in the absence of an effective sales prospecting mechanism. You determine your target audience among your potential customers during this process. As a result, sales prospecting can be described as the process of building a database of potential customers to turn them into actual customers via communication.
If you want to understand why you should begin sales prospecting, consider this: without leads, you will have no sales, and without sales, your company will be doomed to fail.
Sales prospecting is vital in that it has a direct impact on lead velocity. If you spend your time on the wrong leads, you’ll almost certainly miss out on the ones you need. As a result, you must have the appropriate leads. The steps to getting the right leads are as follows:
Outline Your Prospecting Strategy
To begin, decide what kind of leads you want to attract. To do so, concentrate on the target audience’s demographics, features, and desires. You can also get help by integrating your marketing and sales tools. For instance, many companies integrate Hubspot and Salesforce and reap great benefits.
You may determine their needs and desires based on the information you obtain. Research and referrals may be used to obtain the details. In a nutshell, building a preferred customer identity will teach you how to improve your sales strategies.
Set Your Value Proposition
After you’ve outlined your prospecting plan, the next move is to define your value proposition. A value proposition is a statement that summarizes the advantages and benefits that your product or service can provide to consumers. The definition of your product or service, its appeal, and your target audience are all included in the Value Proposition.
By stating your value proposition, you make it clear what your customers would get from using your product or service that they wouldn’t get otherwise. It could be anything from cost-cutting to better customer service.
In other terms, the value proposition identifies what your ideal consumers already have and what they will benefit from purchasing your goods or services.
5. Use Social Media Data
Social networking is a smart way to get to know your potential customers. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others are ideal because they can provide you with a wealth of knowledge.
For example, using Instagram analytics, you can quickly determine which posts are receiving the most attention. As a result, if you share a YouTube video on Instagram to introduce your product and it receives high engagement, you can rely on the feedback and convert your followers into actual customers.
Use social media to get to know their audience, get feedback, connect with people, and run giveaways to benefit from a word-of-mouth marketing campaign and convert followers to brand supporters.
Here is how Wetnwild has used Instagram to introduce its voluminous mascara:
6. Qualify Your Prospects
Qualifying leads entails determining which groups of leads to contact. Leads that can’t be turned into actual customers are always the product of bad or poor prospects. Defining systematic sales and marketing plans will assist you in determining your prospects’ qualifications.
Surveys, behavioral segmentation, data enrichment, and other methods will help you get the details you need to follow the right leads.
7. Follow the 80/20 Rule
The 80-20 law, also known as the Pareto Principle, states that 20% of all triggers result in 80% of all outcomes. The object of this rule is to identify the most efficient inputs and attempt to prioritize them.
The Pareto Principle does not imply that you can work fewer hours. While it states that 20% of efforts are sufficient, this does not mean that the timing should be shortened. It means that 20% of the total work effort is responsible for efficiency.
Consequently, it is important to continue concentrating on the most major tasks that have resulted in good outcomes.
8. Use Templates to Respond to Your Emails
Using email is one way to improve sales efficiency. You can set aside some time solely for responding to emails.
Responding to emails takes a lot of time, so it’s a monotonous yet necessary job to be done every day. So, here’s where technology comes in handy!
One way to simplify the email response process is to use email templates. You can save time and boost your productivity by using email templates.
If you don’t take this advice seriously, you’ll soon find yourself drowning in unanswered emails. As a result, you will have little time to devote to your other, perhaps more important responsibilities.
Here is how Mango used email templates to introduce its denim collection:
9. Send Precise Emails
Quick emails are thought to perform well in the past. Traditional marketing beliefs, on the other hand, will not work for your online company. Instead of sending short emails, the modern view is to send better and more concise emails to improve sales efficiency.
One way to articulate your purpose clearly in your emails is to send process-centric emails which means you should:
- Set a clear objective for your emails.
- Select a method for accomplishing your objective.
- Make the procedure simple to follow for all.
After that, you’ll be able to send more precise emails which will help you improve your sales efficiency.
10. Follow Up
Once you’ve contacted your leads and sent them emails, you’ll have to wait for their answers. So far, you’ve done an excellent job, which is commendable. You’ve put in a lot of effort to find the lead that’s right for your business. You’ve done a lot of testing and study. Now, waiting is not a good strategy for dealing with this issue.
Following up is a good way to ask the lead you’ve selected to respond to your email indirectly. The frequency with which you follow up on an answer is determined by you and the importance of the lead to your company.
It is not just beneficial for you to follow up to receive an answer. It also creates a positive impact on the lead because they would see you as a loving and trustworthy individual or company.
As a result, it’s possible that the lead initially refused to respond to your email, but the follow-up convinces them to do so. As a result, following up can be described as giving yourself a second chance to be noticed by your desired lead.
11. Do Research Before a Meeting with Your Prospect
It might be necessary for you to call or schedule a meeting with your prospect. You should prepare for the conversation before such a call or conference. Give yourself as much time as possible to prepare.
You can present your product or service in a way that makes your prospect feel more connected if you know their characteristics, preferences, demographics, and so on. You can find such data by using existing resources, such as the prospect’s website, social media, business profile, and so on.
Consider how you can present the advantages of your product or service more compellingly. Furthermore, assess the risks that can act as a roadblock on your prospect’s path to conversion and work to overcome them.
To put it another way, investing more time in analysis and identifying the right options will significantly improve your conversion rate. As a result, you’ll see an improvement in your sales efficiency.
12. Make an Organized CRM
Having a clean CRM is one way to increase sales efficiency and save time. If you don’t have a well-organized CRM, data entry and updating will take a long time every day. So, instead of devoting your time to a job that requires more commitment, you’ve spent it all on your disorganized CRM.
Here are the common issues of a messy CRM:
- On a regular basis, several members of the sales team waste time on the messed-up CRM.
- If the amount of data becomes higher, finding information becomes more difficult.
- Other employees are unable to locate the notes you took during a call or meeting with a prospect.
So, to free up more time for your other responsibilities, spend some time cleaning up your CRM. Another choice is to automate your CRM so that it is automatically modified.
13. Use Lead Scoring
Leads are divided into many groups in general:
- Genuine clients
- Leads that are on their way to becoming actual customers
- Those at the top of the sales funnel
- And then there are leads that are too uninterested to be counted
Lead scoring is a method of categorizing the leads based on their sales-readiness. Such scoring is based on your prospects’ preferences, where they are in the sales funnel, and how well they are suited to your business.
A good lead scoring system increases the chances of potential leads making it through the sales funnel. It also aids the sales team in time management and allocating resources to turn leads.
The benefit of lead scoring is that you can determine how to handle your prospects in terms of follow-up time. Furthermore, you can use lead scoring to determine when a marketing qualified lead should be converted to a sales qualified lead. You can also watch your prospects’ responses to your messages to see if they are interested.
If you have the resources to monitor your prospects, for example, you will see how quickly they react to you and hence how likely they are to convert. To put it another way, lead scoring allows you to spend more time on convertible leads rather than reluctant or uninterested ones.
Automation, in general, has a lot to offer in terms of increasing sales efficiency. When time management problems are resolved, there will be ample time for critical activities.
14. Boost Sales Training
The importance of proper sales training cannot be overstated. It will help your sales team members improve their skills, which will improve the efficiency of your sales strategies.
It should be remembered, however, that mastering skills are not enough; a sales team must also know how to put what they’ve learned into practice. If such a condition does not exist, the whole procedure will have been for naught, and the money and time invested will have been wasted.
If, on the other hand, sales training is effective from start to finish, the boost in sales efficiency can more than make up for the money and time invested.
15. Track Your Sales Measurement
The act of extracting information by evaluating sales metrics is known as sales measurements or sales analytics. This action aims to forecast future sales productivity.
Sales analysis entails a thorough examination of all sales operations to determine revenue results and set potential objectives. Using KPIs to define goals for your sales team is one sales analytics practice to mention.
It’s difficult to know if your sales investments are working without sales KPIs. Tracking your sales metrics helps you identify the areas where you can improve your sales efficiency.
16. Encourage Referrals
People nowadays choose to rely on the advice of their friends and family over conventional advertisements. As a result, when your existing customers refer their friends to buy from you, you’ll get a flood of new leads with a high conversion rate.
You are not helping your company if you do not use your existing customers as a source of free advertising for your goods or services. As a result, using your current customers is critical on your path to attracting further leads.
There are three reasons why you should value your current customers:
- Customers that have purchased your product or used your service and considered both to be satisfactory. It’s very likely that they’ll buy from you again. Holding those customers is, of course, much less costly than trying to find new ones.
- These customers provide you with invaluable input on how you function. To put it another way, whether they come back for more goods or services, you know you’re doing a good job with this group of customers.
- They will help you save money in a variety of ways, not just by buying from you. But they can also help the company by serving as referrals and bringing in leads who are eager to convert. As a result of these customers, you will generate new leads, which will most likely transform into actual customers.
As a result, you should consider referral bonuses as a way to facilitate such referrals. These rewards can be provided to your customers in the form of coupons or credits. Giving out coupons or credits can’t compare to the advantages of using such a low-cost lead generation source.
17. Put Sales and Marketing in Alignment
Your sales and marketing teams must connect with one another. It’s a mistake to think of them as two separate parts of your business. You should ask these two teams to collaborate closely if you want to generate qualified leads through improved sales productivity.
The process of introducing leads to your company and turning them into actual customers is accelerated when your marketing team shares ideas with your sales team.
18. Make Use of Tools and Software
As a sales manager, you can provide the sales staff with the necessary resources and software. Such tools assist you in automating and completing a vast number of tasks.
Although you can still do it manually, you can consider how much time you should spend on other tasks to make further progress.
19. Adopt a Positive Attitude
You should have an optimistic and great attitude if you want to monitor the sales outcomes. Your attitude toward your sales activities is critical in that it may influence your ability to achieve your objectives. Your attitude can control, help, or improve sales.
Examine the top sales performers that you consider to be good sales executives. Analyzing these people’s attitudes will reveal how effective it is to maintain a positive attitude toward your business.
Bio
I am Parichehr Parsi, a born writer, and a copywriter. I currently write Instagram marketing blog posts for SocialPros. I love reading, doing research, and updating myself every day. Find me on LinkedIn!
